Of all the arts, the cinema has traditionally been the most passive from the audience's perspective. We stare at the screen, and any reactions we have (burying our faces in pillows, crying, laughing etc) tend to be solitary.
But when it comes to the Lost Landscapes of San Francisco film series, which received its seventh annual screening at The Castro Theatre last night, interactivity rules.
Curated by the archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger and produced under the auspices of the Long Now Foundation, Lost Landscapes weaves together … [Read more...]

Chloe Veltman

...is the Senior Arts Editor at KQED (www.kqed.org), one of the U.S.'s most prominent public media organizations. Chloe returns to the Bay Area following two years as Arts Editor at Colorado Public Radio (www.cpr.org), where she was tapped to launch and lead the state-wide public media organization's first ever multimedia culture bureau. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (2011-2012) and Humanities Center Fellow (2012-2013) at Stanford University, Chloe has contributed reporting and criticism to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BBC Classical Music Magazine, American Theatre Magazine, WQXR and many other media outlets. Chloe was also the host and executive producer of VoiceBox, a syndicated, weekly public radio and podcast series all about the art of the human voice (www.voicebox-media.org), which ran for four years between 2009 and 2013. Her study about the evolution of singing culture in the U.S. is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Check out Chloe's website at www.chloeveltman.com and connect with her on Twitter via @chloeveltman. [Read More …]

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]